The Sex Trade, Part III: Where They Love Americans…For a Living

There’s an expat in a bar called the Blue Marlin, which is on the ground floor of a pink hotel in downtown San José, Costa Rica. He used to be a detective, did a bit of vice, enough to know how the world works, how people think. It’s late, and he’s drinking gin.

“These girls,“ he says, waving his glass at the chicas. The place is packed with chicas. “They average out at, what? An eight and a half ? Nine?“

“Now look at the guys.“ Another sweep with the glass. Almost every man in the place is a gringo. “Guys like them, to get a girl like one of these in the States, they’ve gotta have three things. They’ve gotta have a good job. They’ve gotta have a lot of money. And they’ve gotta be a nice guy.“

The expat takes a drink, studies the gringos again. “All these guys,“ he says, “they’ve probably got one of those things. They might even have two of those things. But I guarantee you, none of them have all three.“

When you’re not drunk and the place is almost empty, this is what it looks like: There are tables just inside the door to the right, three rows of them between the windows fronting the street and the wooden rail that keeps people from tumbling off the raised platform that holds the main bar, which is huge, two peninsulas poking out in the shape of an upside-down U. There are TVs bolted to the walls and tuned to sports channels, because this is ostensibly a sports bar, and there are fish—stuffed fish, carved fish, and sculpted fish—mounted above the liquor shelves and dangling from the ceiling, because the “World Famous“ Blue Marlin is also ostensibly a fisherman’s bar, even though it’s hours away from any place where you might actually catch a fish. Also, it’s a gringo joint: There’s a crinkled American flag, like the ones newspapers printed after September 11, taped to one wall, and dozens of shoulder patches, left behind by American cops and firemen, tacked up behind the bar—San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Boynton Beach, Waynesboro, a hundred other little towns you’ve never heard of. Eleven o’clock on a Monday morning during the Costa Rican rainy season and it’s all white boys at the bar, eight of them, except for one wobbly local named Fernando that the security guys keep trying to pour out the door.

Seven girls sit on stools in the back corner, smoking cigarettes and looking bored. Six more are off the to the left, just beyond the casino, in the lobby of the Hotel Del Rey. They’re working, but not very hard. Not much to choose from this early—not for them, not for the men. Wait a little while—say, five o’clock—when the sun’s still clawing through the rain clouds over San José and before the streets are lousy with beggars and peddlers. By cocktail hour, the place is jammed. There are a few ticos and the biggest Asian kid you’ve ever seen, but the rest of the men here are gringos. There are young guys in tank tops and old guys wearing socks in their sandals and a whole mess of graying middle-aged guys in polos and floral-print shirts. They’ve got the bar surrounded three deep, and most of the tables are gone, too.

And they’re not even half the crowd.

The chicas—Christ, there’s a lot of them. Black girls and brown girls and beige girls and even a couple of white girls, brunet and blond and redheaded and skinny and chubby and tall and short and stacked and not-as-stacked, and every one of them single.

Are they looking at you? Hell yes. A hundred brown eyes turn on you the second you walk through the door, trying to catch your attention before you even get past the security guard with the metal detector, like you’re Brad Pitt or something. When’s the last time that happened at the Bennigan’s in Parsippany? Never, that’s when.

Which is exactly why all these men are here. “San José: the very best place in the world to get laid, I am convinced,“ an aficionado who calls himself La Muerte (literally, Death) wrote a few years back in one of the bajillion or so field reports that pop up when you search “Costa Rica sex“ on the Internet. Even then, in 2001, the Blue Marlin was legendary among a certain sort of gringo tourist—the sort who likes a wide selection of pretty, inexpensive women in a safe place where the bartenders speak their language. But why stop at the Blue Marlin? That’s just one joint in a city of 300,000. There’s Key Largo and Atlantis and all the other bars, and the strip clubs that hang billboards—THE NEW NIGHT CLUB KUMAR: OH, YES!—in English along the highway from the airport, and the street corners and parks parceled out by gender and age and fetish. Cheap blow jobs from old whores with drug problems? The Red Zone, a few dirty blocks around the Central Market. Teenagers? There’s four by the pay phones at the edge of Parque Morazan. Transvestites, transsexuals, queers? They’ve all got their own turf close by, and the cabbies all know exactly where they are. “It’s very easy to become like a kid in a candy store when you first go to San Jos é,“ as Death says. “There’s so much available talent down there, and it’s all done in wide-open public spaces. That’s a great feeling, but don’t lose your good sense in the original bliss.“

Yeah, don’t lose your good sense. Get a seat—one of the hightops by the bar rail is open. Have a drink. Take your time. The girls aren’t going anywhere. Sure, every few minutes one leaves with a guy, wiggles out the back toward the hotel lobby or out the front to a cab, but the selection never noticeably thins. The chicas, all freelancers and all 18 (or at least with papers to prove it), always outnumber the gringos. That’s the point.

They won’t pester you if you don’t want them to. They’re not like those girls in the Philippines who swarm your table, jabbering in broken English. You buy me ladies’ drink? You bar-fine me? Or the ones in Thailand. They’ll grab your junk right out on the street. You ready? Oh, you feel ready. Total whore scene. No, at the better bars in Costa Rica, at the Blue Marlin, you’ve got to give a girl a signal, make eye contact, let her know you’re interested. When she slides up next to you, she’ll ask if you’re alone or if you want some company. She’ll be charming and gently aggressive, in a way you only wish the women back home would be. So talk to her. She’s not going to ask you for any money, not right away. “Take your time, be selective, and get to know the chica before you do any negotiating,“ Death says. “Look for someone with a personality to go along with the looks—someone who smiles and seems to enjoy being around you.“

Thing is, they all seem to enjoy being around you. Prostitutes are good like that. The best ones make you forget they’re even prostitutes, make you think you’ve stumbled into the greatest singles’ bar in the world. That girl you’re talking to, she’ll tell you that you’re handsome and sexy and intelligent, and she’ll make you believe it no matter how fat or dumb or ugly you are because she knows you’ve got a hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket. Back home, you’d spend that on dinner and a movie, and for what? A kiss on the cheek? Down here, that gets you laid, and by a woman who pretends she doesn’t think you’re a pig.

Have a few more drinks, let it get late, way into the early morning. The gringo crowd is clearing out now. Too many chicas and not enough customers. The tall one in the tight white pants, the one who’s been eyeing you for the past hour, she’s at the table asking for a light, but she’s speaking in Spanish, so you don’t realize what she wants until she grabs a pack of matches from the ashtray.

“Where you staying?“ She knows a little English, enough to get by.

“Why?“

She smiles. Bad teeth, but otherwise pretty: slender, long dark hair, coppery skin that makes her halter top seem even whiter. “Where?“

“Holiday Inn.“

“Nice hotel.“

No, it’s an average hotel with an intermittent ant problem. What’s nice about it, though, is that it’s a Holiday Inn. If you’re coming to Costa Rica to hump prostitutes, a room in the world’s family-friendliest hotel is good cover. Tell your wife or girlfriend you’re staying at the Hotel Del Rey and you might as well be sleeping at Heidi Fleiss’s offshore discount whorehouse. The Del Rey’s Web site is respectable enough—“Children under 12 stay free“ is a nice touch—but the bad shit, the stuff that’ll get you in trouble, starts on the first link that comes up on Google. (“Hotel Del Rey and Blue Marlin Bar, the best known Sport-Bar and Casino of Costa Rica, are San José’s number one meeting spots, specially for single men looking for sexy girls, and night live activities.“) No, better to stay at the Holiday Inn. It’s just on the other side of the park, and the staff doesn’t care who you bring back. They see it all night, every night, gringos tottering in with hookers.

The girl keeps talking, asking questions. Small talk. Where you from? Married? Girlfriend? Want one? Lie to her. Or not. Like she cares. Ask her questions. Where’s she from? Cuba. How old? Twenty-one. What’s the tattoo, the one crawling up the small of her back?

“It’s a panther,“ she says. “But the little girl kitty is lonely, and she needs a big, strong male tiger.“ She means you, even though you’re neither big nor strong and have never been mistaken for a tiger.

It sounds better in Spanish.

The Costa Rican government, of course, would prefer that its wedge of the Central American isthmus not be so well regarded among American men trolling for sex. The tourist board is much more enthusiastic about their beaches, rain forests, and volcanoes, and the country’s official slogan—no artificial ingredients—would seem to have nothing at all to do with picking up prostitutes in bars. True, every horny American who comes down here is renting a hotel room, eating in restaurants, probably drinking, maybe gambling, and definitely paying the $26 departure tax on his way out; at least some of the money he’s spending on sex goes back into the local economy. But what self-respecting country wants to shill for those dollars? “You might be sure that this type of tourist are not wanted here,“ says one Costa Rican official. “We only want the people that want to spend a Pura Vida’ time.“

Yet the whoremongers came in droves anyway. And by the early 1990s, they’d branded Costa Rica with a reputation as a sex haven—a reputation that stuck and then exploded near the end of the century. Why that happened isn’t complicated. For one thing, prostitution is legal, or at least isn’t illegal: The business isn’t tad or regulated like, say, casinos or bars, but there is no law against an adult selling his or her body for cash. So you’re not going to come down to San José and get busted by an undercover cop. Prostitution is also indigenously rampant and culturally, if quietly, acceptable—70 percent of those who pay for sex are locals—so you don’t feel all that awkward with your arm around a whore.

For another thing, Costa Rica is close, a four-hour flight out of Atlanta. The hard-core-sex destinations—Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines—require major investments in airfare and flying time, twenty-two hours to Manila on a direct flight, twenty-three to Bangkok. Costa Rica, on the other hand, can be done in a long weekend. It’s relatively safe, fairly well developed, and friendly toward Americans. Plus, with the notable exception of San José, it’s a lush little emerald of a nation with plenty of other plausible reasons to visit. Tell your wife you’re going fishing with some buddies, spend a night at the Holiday Inn, two more in Jacó or another one of the beach towns now overrun with prostitutes, then fly home and brag about all the big ones you caught. Who has to know?

Exactly how many tourists come here every year looking for sex is impossible to determine; “get laid“ isn’t one of the bos that can be checked off under “purpose of trip“ on the immigration form. But there are clues. Of the 500,000 or so Americans who visit the country each year, for instance, 25.8 percent are single men. There are also at least eleven companies that offer either complete package tours to San José, including airfare, or lodging, transportation, and women once you land. Solo Adventures bills itself as “a Full Service Travel Agency specializing in pre-designed adult companion packages to all regions of Costa Rica for the single (body or mind) Gent.“ Bendricks International Men’s Club will fly you down, put you up in one of eight luxury resorts for three nights, and supply “companion escorts“ for $1,695. “You can enjoy the private company of South American women who can satisfy even the most active imagination in one of the world’s great adult travel vacation destinations for men,“ the Bendricks Web site says. (The company won’t say how many men they take down each year. In fact, the guy behind the desk in the Miami office won’t say anything at all—he just shakes his head at every question.)

But the commercial tours account for just a fraction of the gringos renting women in Costa Rica. (Only the truly inept and incompetent need to hire a middleman anyway.) Aside from the dedicated sex tourists, there are legions of part-timers, guys who come for some other reason and take a side trip, so to speak. The problem is, how to separate the dedicated ’mongers from the dabblers? The group from Chicago that flies down to San José every summer, outed last year by the local ABC station and its hidden cameras, would presumably lean toward the dedicated-’monger camp, considering there is absolutely nothing to do in San José other than gamble, drink, and pick up prostitutes. (ABC7’s ominous tagline—“ the Shameful Obsession“—would suggest as much, too.) The so-called Michigan Boys, on the other hand, might tilt toward dabbler. They hold a legitimate annual fishing tournament, one that in 2004 drew 167 contestants—including a suburban police chief, a school-board president, and a judge—only it was based at a resort that happened to be stocked with prostitutes. “The problem with our trip,“ one of the organizers told WXYZ-TV in Detroit, which followed the Michigan Boys to Costa Rica, “is that some of the guys go there and party, and they talk too much. And then somebody hears in a bar about [it]—wife or sister-in-law hears—and it’s sad because not everybody goes there and does it.“ Yeah, that’s the problem—they talk too much. Not surprisingly, though, every other guy that WXYZ asked about the trip denied cavorting with whores. (Warren, Michigan, police chief Danny Clark actually said, “I did not know that they were hookers.“)

Or ignore the statistics and junkets. Just look around. Stand at the edge of Parque Morazan and watch the parade of white guys with young brown girls. “This place,“ says that American expat former cop, “has to be the number one destination in the Western Hemisphere for horny, middle-aged moron-loser-gringos jacked up on Viagra.“

Take these American guys in the bar overhanging the lobby at the Holiday Inn—three of them, clean-cut, midthirties. They staggered in on separate flights, which is apparent because they’re swapping reports on how crowded each plane was. This is some kind of reunion for them, and they’re sitting around, waiting for seven more friends to show up.

Rain is coming down hard outside. “I remember a lot of heavy rain last year, too,“ one of them says.

“Yeah,“ the second one says, “and I remember a lot of heavy screaming.“

They all bust up at that.

“Seriously, I had no intention of doing anything,“ the second guy goes on. “I swear to God. But when those two girls grabbed me and said, We’re drinking tonight,’ man, that was it. That was it.“

A fourth gringo shows up, then a fifth, a sixth. Same pattern every time: flight report, bitch about the rain, recap last year’s highlights, always with dramatic emphasis on the last syllable or three.

“I know this massage parlor, anything you want. An-nee-thing.“

“I had this girl, a hundred thousand colones“—200 bucks, give or take—“and I had her for the whole night. The whole night.“

It goes on like this until the last two guys show up. They’ve got American girls with them, one a wife, one a girlfriend. Now the boys are talking about…rain forests and rafting. And dinner. They’re going to the restaurant at the Hotel Del Rey, where the food’s pretty good.

“Yeah,“ another guy says. “They just stand outside and watch you. And wait.“

The academic debate over whether prostitution is a good idea is pretty simple in its extremes. On one side are the abolitionists—some feminist and religious groups and, since 2003, the U.S. government. They believe that selling sex is always wrong, inherently demeaning, a fundamental violation of basic human rights. Whether they’re philosophically correct is irrelevant to the actual world. The global sex industry, ancient and entrenched, employs/exploits/enslaves (the verb you choose is a function of your politics and the circumstances of individual prostitutes) tens of millions of women and girls, and generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Abolishing it, purging the planet of every escort and bar girl and streetwalker, and prosecuting or shaming every john into submission is no more feasible than eliminating agriculture or the auto industry.

On the other side are libertarians, a tiny minority of prostitutes who prefer to be called “sex workers,“ and, one would suppose, a good percentage of the men who pay for sex. They believe that consenting adults should be free to do whatever they damn well please, though probably the pragmatists among them will concede that the business should be regulated to ensure everyone’s health and safety.

That argument is worse than irrelevant: It’s just silly, a utopian notion bordering on idiotic.

Sure, there are a handful of brothels that enforce strict rules on condoms for the men and health checks for the women. But those are a minuscule proportion of the business, the vast majority of which is carried out in dirty hotels and strip clubs, in cars and on street corners, and almost entirely cash transactions between strangers who prefer anonymity—the very definition of unsafe and unregulated. In poor countries with thriving sex industries, enforcing any semblance of order would be impossible. Even if police corruption and criminal gangs magically vanished, places like Thailand or the Philippines have neither the manpower nor the financial incentive to monitor hundreds of thousands of prostitutes and johns. Even developed countries who attempt some form of regulation and encourage prostitutes to register have had dismal results. In the Netherlands, for instance, fewer than one in ten of an estimated 25,000 prostitutes have chosen to be officially licensed. Believing that will change, that it can change, is naive. Most prostitutes—the ones controlled by pimps or traffickers, the minors, the illegal immigrants—aren’t in any position to ask for government help, and the ones who are usually don’t want an official record of a profession they hope will be temporary. For all the blather about empowering sex workers, few women want prostitution on their résumés.

Moreover, legalizing it in any particular place—in other words, eliminating the risk of arrest and diminishing the immediate social stigma (at least for the men) —almost always increases demand, which in turn requires an increased supply. And since there are never enough local women clamoring to be prostitutes, especially in developed nations, they have to be imported. In the early 1990s, for example, an estimated 75 percent of Germany’s prostitutes had been shipped in from South America (a demographic that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been largely replaced by women from places like Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine). Common sense, as well as government statistics and a 2005 U.S. State Department report, suggests that at least some of those women were trafficked (that is, lured with the promise of legitimate jobs or simply forced) into the country by outlaw pimps—one of the problems legalization is theoretically meant to solve. What Paraguayan peasant—even if she truly wants to be a whore in Europe—has the money and the connections to get there and go into business for herself?

Or take the Czech Republic, where, for a decade, prostitution has been a misdemeanor offense so widely unenforced that it was de facto legal (and a pro-legalization bill is currently awaiting a vote in parliament). In 2004 the Interior Ministry counted almost 900 brothels, 200 in Prague alone—dramatic growth for an industry that, one expert observes, was “almost nonexistent“ in that country a decade ago. On weekends, the Czech border town of Cheb (population 32,000) is flooded with 10,000 German men who sample the prostitutes from Russia, the Ukraine, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania—all countries listed by the State Department as sources of trafficked women. And the profits, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, are collected by fifteen criminal gangs.

And then there’s Costa Rica. For such a beautiful little country that markets itself so aggressively to ecotourists and fishermen, it can’t seem to shake its reputation as a sex paradise. San José has long been the hub; Death called it “the very best place in the world to get laid“ way back in 2001, after all, and apparently both the Chicago contingent and the Michigan Boys have been chartering down for more than ten years. Yet rather than being contained and controlled in the capital city, prostitution has expanded across the country, growing along with the crowds of tourists that have increased from 435,000 in 1990 to 1,450,000 last year. Prostitutes now shuttle to the ports on both coasts where cruise ships dock, and they’re part of the scenery in most of the beach towns.

Fifteen years ago, a tico named Jorge used to drive two hours over the mountains with his family to Jacó, a surf town on the Pacific coast and the closest beach to San José. Look at the place now. On a slow night in low season in the Beatle Bar—another joint that’s “World Famous,“ which is apparently code for where a gringo can get a whore—twenty prostitutes are wasting their time on seven white guys and a couple of coeds who don’t stay long. When it closes, the girls move down the strip to Monkey Bar. Farther down is Pancho Villa, where the kitchen in the downstairs club is open late, and the entrance to a strip club upstairs is around the corner. Two young guys, pale and preppy, come out with their arms around a couple of tall black women and grab a cab. Then three chicas—16, tops—stumble up the street in spike heels. (“You can always tell the prostitutes,“ Jorge says. “They always look like they just got out of the shower. A really long shower.“)

There are no reliable estimates of how many are working in the country—since they’re not required to register, they can’t be counted, and the trade is highly seasonal—but the consensus among aid groups and Costa Ricans is that there are more than enough and more than before. The conservative guess is that half of those working the gringo crowd are foreigners, women imported from Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and all the other Latin American countries with worse economies and fewer tourists. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, lists Costa Rica as a source and destination country for trafficked women, as well as a transit point for women trafficked from the Southern Hemisphere and Eastern Europe into the United States and other wealthy nations.

And that’s in a place that would prefer the horny gringos stay home.

The barroom discussion about prostitution, on the other hand, isn’t a debate at all. It’s straight rationalization. It’s the expat cop sitting on a stool, waving his glass of gin at all the gringos, channeling their thoughts:

To get a girl like one of those in the States…

It’s complete bullshit, of course—millions upon millions of working stiffs have beautiful wives and girlfriends, and there’s no shortage of rich American assholes with models on their arms—but a particular class of whoremonger will convince himself it’s true. That’s the point of being in a place such as the Blue Marlin as opposed to paying a crack addict $20 for a blow job—believing that those girls, the pretty, flirty ones in a clean bar, actually like you. Sex tourism is built on that very premise: These girls, the chicas and the Eastern Europeans and the Southeast Asians, are different from American women, more loving, less judgmental, oblivious to your gut and your hairline and the fact that you’re the sort of guy who hires women to have sex with him. Norman Barabash, a nebbishy fellow from Long Island whose company, Big Apple Oriental Tours, guided American men to the bars of Angeles City in the Philippines before the New York attorney general’s office shut it down, put it bluntly on a promotional tape:

“Filipinas are not only the most beautiful girls in the world, but also they’re among the most passionate,“ he said. “And best of all, you don’t have to date them for five months to find out if they like you enough to give you their passion. Five hours, or five minutes, is more like it. While the ladies back home are working out their hang-ups with their therapists, you’ll be having the time of your life right here in mind-blowing, and everything-else-blowing, Angeles City.“

Change Filipina to Latina and the rest of it’s interchangeable. Bendricks has its prattle about “women who enjoy exuding an aura of sexual vibrancy.“ Solo Adventures promises “stunning sensual women providing warm, friendly, and very personal intimate service.“ The Web pages of freelancers extolling the purportedly genuine sensuality of Latin women run into the thousands.

Ken Franzblau, a consultant for Equality Now (the women’s-rights organization that started the campaign to get Big Apple shut down), has been calling tour companies for almost a decade, posing as a potential client, listening to the pitches, even checking references with satisfied customers. It’s been a nine-year tape loop playing over the phone. “It’s talked about, I guess, like the guys in Ponce de León’s expedition talking about the Fountain of Youth,“ he says. “ You won’t believe it. Women throw themselves at you, as much sex as you want. You’ll feel like Tom Cruise.’ They always say you’ll feel like Tom Cruise. Except for the guys who are really old. They’ll tell you you’ll feel like John Wayne.“

The level of self-delusion is stupefying. In April, for instance, a guy who calls himself “Jacó Lover“ posted a report on his second trip in two years to the Costa Rican coast, where he got the “total GFE“—girlfriend experience—“for $100, including spending the night.“ The highlight: “She happily let me eat her very pretty pussy, and if she wasn’t having an orgasm, then she was a damned good actress.“

Golly, you think?

“There’s a part of them that’s lying to themselves and creating this fantasy and believing these girls actually like them,“ says Donna M. Hughes, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who, for sixteen years, has been studying prostitutes and the men who pay them. “They’re really just deluding themselves. And I really think that keeping the online diaries is a way of reliving the fantasy. They can edit out any sign that she didn’t enjoy this and didn’t want to be with this guy.“

Which, unless she is as rare among prostitutes as virgins, she didn’t. To believe she did is to ignore a basic truth of human nature: No one really wants to be a whore. A statistical summary of women in prostitution is a chronicle of human wreckage—economic, physical, and chemical. A 2003 survey of prostitutes in nine countries—Canada, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, the United States, and Zambia—headed up by a clinical psychologist named Melissa Farley revealed women who’d suffered astonishing rates of childhood sexual abuse (from 34 percent in Turkey to 84 percent in Canada and Zambia) or physical abuse (39 percent of Thais to 73 percent of Canadians); current or past homelessness (84 percent in the United States); and current drug problems (75 percent in the United States and 95 percent in Canada). The results of a 1999 UNICEF study of child prostitutes in Costa Rica between the ages of 11 and 16—and since most prostitutes start before they turn 18, it’s relevant—were worse: 80 percent had been sexually abused before their twelfth birthday, 62 percent had been physically abused, and 60 percent smoked crack daily. And the most telling statistic from Farley’s survey? Almost every prostitute she talked to wanted out, from 68 percent in Mexico to 92 percent in, of all places, Thailand, the world’s premier sex destination.

.

“I tell you what,“ says Franzblau. “If these guys knew how many of these girls are thinking about sticking a knife in their back while they’re having sex with them, they’d be amazed. Forget amazed. They’d be staying home.“

But they don’t know, so they keep coming. Who cares what the tourist board says? The hotel clerks, the bartenders, the cabbies—they’re all part of the fantasy, all in on the hustle. No one looks at you funny down here if you want to get a girl for the night or just for an hour. No one calls you a loser if you pay to get laid.

There’s a tico named…well, forget his name. He used to be in the business of taking horny gringo dollars, used to manage a club, and he doesn’t want to piss off his old boss. Then again, he’s not too happy with how this is all turning out for his country. “Remember Bush, the first one, when he said the New World Order’?“ he says. “In the New World Order, we’re the playground.“

Grab a cab at the airport, and even if the driver speaks no English he’ll say, “Chicas, sí?“ and he’ll know you understand. Tell him you want to go to a club, and he’ll drop you off at a strip joint like the one the tico used to manage, and he’ll collect a thousand colones from the club owner for delivering you. Americans, the tico says, are like “Attila, you know, the Hun,“ but they’ve got dollars. Pay the cover—ten bucks, including two drinks—and watch the show: strippers, then a live lesbian act, then $2 lap dances, then an amateur act…all in an hour and, damn, it’s only a Tuesday night. Resist the hard sell for a private dance in the back, two bucks a minute, six minutes minimum. Then quit resisting. Follow her into a bland room with a wastebasket full of tissues and Wet-Naps. “Tip enough,“ the tico says, “and they’re all hookers.“ Want to take her out of the club? One-fifty to the house, one-fifty to her.

Maybe the national economy doesn’t need the money, but the club does. The girl does. The cabbie does. The maid changing sheets at the Holiday Inn does. The tico’s friend who runs a local tanning salon does. Eliminate prostitution, that friend says, and you eliminate 60 percent of his clientele. No, better to keep it legal, keep it out in the open.

Just don’t talk about it too much. For all the bravado, for all the Web chatter, for all the Attila swagger, the gringo whoremongers are exceptionally shy. The guys in the bar don’t want to talk. Be a nosy stranger, ask an obvious question—“Whaddya doin’ down here?“—and they’ll give you a stare that’s either blank or surly. The ’mongers who brag so loudly on the Internet don’t use their real names. Even the out-of-business tico club manager would prefer not to have his name in a magazine no one in Costa Rica will read.

“You know why?“ he says. “Because you’re touching the darkest part of the human soul. You do this in your own country, you’ll have shame.

“Your shame,“ he says, “brings you here.“

On the immigration forms American Airlines passes out on its flights from Miami to San José, in fine blue print just below the usual blocks for your name and passport number and address, there’s a curious line in both Spanish and English: “The penalty for sexual abuse towards minors in Costa Rica implies prison. Law #7899.“

When you get off the plane, there are posters taped to each of the kiosks where the immigration officers stamp your passport. They show the large, sad face of a teenage girl and, smaller and down in one corner, a pair of white man’s hands poking out through what appear to be the bars of a prison cell. “Her soul torn to pieces,“ the text reads, “and you…behind bars.“ Farther on, next to the door out of customs, there is a life-size cardboard stand-up of a tico—a cabbie, presumably—holding a sign. “Dear tourist,“ the sign held by the sign says. “In Costa Rica, sex with children under 18 is a serious crime. Should you engage in it, we will drive you to jail. We mean it.“ Finally, in the cabs that line up outside the terminal, there are versions of the same sign, again with “We mean it“ underlined with a red slash.

Welcome to Costa Rica, where it is illegal to rape children. Where it is necessary, in fact, to remind every single tourist entering the country that it is wrong to rape children.

The reason those signs are posted, of course, is that Costa Rica has a reputation as a place where you can rape the kids, though it’s rarely put that bluntly. Pedophilia? Okay, yes, agreed: It’s very, very bad, and Costa Rica, like most developing nations, has suffered its share of foreigners preying on its kids. But read the signs again: “under 18“ is in bold for a reason, one that is more demurely referred to as having sex with underage prostitutes, the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 teenagers in San José alone who’ve yet to reach the legal age of consent. Considering that the UNICEF study of young prostitutes found they turned their first trick at the average age of 14, it’s a huge problem.

In 2002, for example, the FBI, along with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and the U.S. embassy in San José, set up a bogus travel agency called, unsubtly, Costa Rican Taboo Vacations, which promised, in magazine and Internet ads, to supply tourists with “companions“ between the ages of 14 and 27. The feds say they were swamped with requests for information, and between December 2003 and August 2004 they arrested eleven people who’d paid deposits or booked trips—with what they believed was a legitimate commercial company—to have sex with kids. Among them: a South Carolina real estate agent and his wife who wanted a pair of 16-year-olds; a Hollywood, Florida, cop who also wanted two 16-year-olds; and a New Jersey middle-school teacher who paid $1,610 for a package that was to include two 12-year-olds.

That’s one example, the results from one fake company. Now eliminate the middleman, the cash deposits, the hard evidence. Just fly to Costa Rica, get drunk, meet a girl on the street. She’ll say she’s 18. Is she lying? She’s got an ID. Is it fake? How can anyone possibly tell? And will the local cops bust the guy who guesses wrong? Do they, in fact, mean it?

Paul Chaves is the man in charge of the Sexual Exploitation Unit in the Ministry of Public Security. He remembers, with something between bitterness and bemusement, when Costa Rica got slammed in the mid- 1990s by the foreign media shooting video of underage prostitutes in downtown San José. ABC, NBC, the BBC, even Spanish television. The government ministers would deny on camera that there was a problem, then the reporters would roll the tape, add some line about “trouble in paradise“—devastatingly effective television. “I know how the media works,“ Chaves says, and several times, because he has two brothers in journalism, which he also says several times.

He also knows that those foreign reporters were right and that his government was wrong—tactically and morally—to say otherwise. So now he’s saying the opposite. Confessing it, really, so aggressively and often that he seems almost to be doing penance for the whole country. He’s a small, blustery man of 36, quite proud of his accomplishments since he took over the Sexual Exploitation Unit two and a half years ago. (His 120-man department also covers juvenile gangs, auto theft, and, oddly, copyright infringement.) When he started, only six of his men worked the sex beat, he says, sharing one car and never leaving San José. Now he has more than forty officers on the job, covering the entire country. Why, just that day his officers rousted a woman who was pimping girls out of a beauty salon. “Pimps and pedophiles,“ he says. “Those are my two enemies.“

But not prostitutes. He is sympathetic: “Some girls who are doing this are students selling their bodies part-time.“ He is philosophical: “I don’t think it would be worth going after prostitutes. Nonsense. Anyone can sell her body to someone else.“ He is practical: “To try to police what women do with their bodies, or what men do with their bodies, we would be a police state.“

Valid points, all. He would acquit himself well in the academic debate. But what about the real-world debate? What about those 16- and 17-year-old prostitutes, the ones the TV crews caught on video and the ones who are still in the park by the Holiday Inn? Don’t they come with the territory? Isn’t that why those signs are cluttering up the airport, making all the legitimate tourists skittish?

“Sometimes,“ he says, “I have my doubts.“ Thoughtful pause. “Any man can make a mistake.“

So, no, all those airport signs—apparently, they don’t mean it.

Chaves hails a cab. It’s a long ride to his home on the outskirts of San José. He talks the whole way. About his 120 officers. About how helpful the United States and Britain have been. About his hatred of pimps and pedophiles. About his government finally admitting it has a problem with both.

The cab stops at his house. The chief of the Sexual Exploitation Unit tells the driver, who doesn’t speak English, to go on to the Holiday Inn, then says good night. He gets out and closes the door.

The cabbie flips on the dome light, reaches back with his right hand. There’s a small pink card between his fingers for a place called Scarlett’s Gentlemen’s Club.

“Titty bar?“

He knows enough English to get by.

Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent. With additional reporting by Greg Veis.

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